On Fri, Oct 10, 2025, at 1:18 AM, Samuel Sieb wrote:
> On 10/9/25 10:13 PM, Marco Moock wrote:
>> On 09.10.2025 15:41 Alex <[email protected]> wrote:
>> 
>>> That was *almost* the solution. I should have thought to just do it
>>> manually, but I needed the installer to tell me whether I needed the
>>> EFI partition on this server, so I didn't think to also try doing it
>>> manually.
>>>
>>> Now, however, the system never reboots. I've set up /boot and
>>> /boot/efi on RAID1. It just produces a blank gray screen after the
>>> install finishes. I changed to another console and mdstat shows the
>>> arrays are being rebuilt, but even after that it just sits there
>>> forever.
>>>
>>> Is it due to /boot on RAID? Or the larger partition?
>> 
>> The EFI partition needs to be FAT32 formatted and type EF00, not on any
>> RAID device.
>
> If you use the right metadata version, it can work with RAID1.  But you 
> do have to get that right and I don't know if the installer lets you set 
> that.

It used to be allowed. As I understand it a RHEL customer wanted it. But 
upstream mdadm said please don't do this because from the firmware standpoint 
it is allowed to read and write to the ESP. And md raid can't detect the 
different states automatically, it's necessary to run repair > md/sync_action 
which ... it has no unambiguous way of knowing which block is correct so it 
only updates blocks in one direction, I forget the rule but man 5 md has it. As 
in, if it sees a difference between mirrors it always copies A and overwrites 
B. So this might sync your other ESP to the primary, or it might revert the 
primary, or worse case is the firmware scribbles on the drives separately and 
repair > sync_action is never done and eventually the ESP is corrupted.

bootupd was at one time looking into how to keep multiple ESPs synced. But I'm 
not sure where that is now.


-- 
Chris Murphy
-- 
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